About Climate Engine

What is Climate Engine?

Climate Engine uses Google’s Earth Engine platform for on-demand processing of satellite and climate data on a web-browser. Climate Engine was started through the White House Climate Data Initiative and a Google Faculty Research award as a partnership between the Desert Research Institute, the University of Idaho and Google, Inc. Climate Engine was officially released in April 2016 through a press release from the White House Water Summit.

Climate Engine features on-demand mapping of environmental monitoring datasets, such as remote sensing and gridded meteorological observations. With fully customizable analyses, Climate Engine enables the user to produce maps and time series summaries from these datasets. Maps are downloadable in GeoTiff format and time series results as .CSV or .XLSX formats. Web URL links are provided for the results so that users can share maps or time series results and easily reproduce the results.

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Why Use Climate Engine?

Climate Engine is unique in that it provides unprecedented access to visualizations and downloads of earth observation datasets. It overcomes computational limitations of big data for use in real-time monitoring or in research contexts. It provides the ability to simply download or share results instead of processing entire data archives locally. Climate Engine is fully customizable for spatial and temporal analyses. Metrics available for processing with Climate Engine include a comprehensive set of variables that provide early warning indicators of climate impacts such as drought, wildfire, ecological stress and agricultural production.